a bleeding purple utah jazz blog

The joke that is the Coach of the Year award

“In this business,” Sloan said Friday, “you don’t want to be the Coach of the Year.” (desnews)

It’s a well-known fact that Jerry Sloan has never won the NBA Coach of the Year award, despite being the only coach to have amassed 1,000 wins with one team and despite there having been 234 coaching changes in the league since he became head coach of the Jazz.

It’s also well-known (in Utah circles) that Jerry Sloan is the only Utah Jazz coach to have never won the award. (So there were only two coaches before Jerry. The statement is still true.)

Perhaps less well-known is that the COY landscape is littered with coaches that have, at one time or another, had some relation to Jerry. In fact, every coach that has ever been affiliated with Sloan the player and Sloan the coach (apart from his rookie year coach), has won the award.

I remain adamant to this day that Jerry was robbed of the award (shame on you, media) in ’03-’04. That was the year that he coached without Stockton and Malone for the first time in 18 years and took a team that was predicted to be the worst team in NBA history to a 42-40 season.

Let’s take a look at COY winners since then.

Sloan is also the only coach in NBA history with more than 1,000 wins to have never won the award. Furthermore, he and George Karl are the only two coaches in the top ten of most coaching victories to have never won the award: